Health startup Buoy raises $6.7 million to invest in recruitment and research

Buoy, a startup using an intelligent algorithm backed by medical data to guess what ails you, has raised $6.7 million in Series A funding from F-Prime Capital Partners, FundRx and various angel investors to help scale operations.

The startup debuted in March of this year to take on WebMD and other online symptom checkers with an algorithm it believes can more accurately diagnose patients. Founder and Harvard-trained MD Andrew Le told TechCrunch at the time he had implemented “a battery of tests” and conducted “a series of studies” to ensure Buoy’s accuracy.

His plan at the time was to onboard both consumers and hospital organizations to swiftly process patients before they see a doctor. Buoy claims it has experienced rapid growth since then and that more than over a quarter of a million people have used the platform.

Buoy will use this round of financing to invest in maintaining that growth in a few key areas, including the recruitment of additional clinical researchers, engineers and marketers and to build integrations with hospitals and providers. FundRx will also supply the startup with physicians for a new medical board.

“The team at Buoy has taken an innovative approach to solving the problem of health symptom search,” said Carl Byers, executive partner at F-Prime. “By engaging patients intelligently at the moment they experience symptoms, Buoy can deliver triage at scale in a way that can be adopted seamlessly within the healthcare system as a new digital front door to the care journey.”